Law Kumar Mishra
On May 20, 1991,three national parties Presidents Chandrashekhar, Murali Manohar Joshi and Rajiv Gandhi were at Bhubaneswar for election campaign and had addressed election meetings at three different places.
While Prime Minister Chandrashekhar stayed at Raj Bhawan, Joshi and Gandhi were put up in VIP guest House.
On May 21 early morning, Gandhi held a press conference. He was in a cheerful mood and looked confident. He talked about Punjab and Ayodhya problems and said, “Kuch hi dino ki to baat hai. We are coming back and it will be solved once our government is formed.”
After the press conference, he left for Visakhapatnam in the private aircraft that he had himself piloted a day earlier from New Delhi after casting his vote. After addressing election meetings in Andhra Pradesh, he flew to Chennai the same evening.
Later, a phone call informed me that ‘Rajiv Gandhi had been killed in bomb blast in Madras’. Still in Lungi, I rushed to the office of The Times of India, which was next door to my residence in 25, A, station square, Masters Canteen in unit 3. The office peon cum guard, Madhab, was woken up to unlock the TP room.
I headed straight to the Telex machine and typed the entire event of the day, recalling that in 1984, Mrs Indira Gandhi had made the famous prophetic words’ mere khoon ka ek, ek boond’ when she was in Bhubaneswar on October 30, 1984 and a day later, she was shot dead. Jawaharlal Nehru, her father, too had suffered a heart attack in Bhubaneswar in 1964 before he passed away on May 27.
Rajiv Gandhi too had witnessed his last morning at Bhubaneswar. Next day, all editions of the Times of India carried the story on the front page with the headline “Bhubaneshwar, the Jinxed place for Nehru Gandhi family”.
(The author is a senior Patna-based journalist, having a long stint with The Times of India in different states)
